A tribute to Rolf Neeb (1929–2006) on the 80th anniversary of his birth

Abstract

The year 2009 marks the 80th anniversary of the birth of the eminent German analytical chemist Rolf Neeb (Fig. 1). Sadly, Rolf Neeb passed away 3 years ago; however, the 80th anniversary of his birth is an appropriate occasion to remember his many scientific achievements, especially his contributions to electroanalytical chemistry. Rolf Neeb was born on January 7, 1929, in Mainz, the only child of the merchant Arthur Neeb and his wife Anna, nee Lerch. In Mainz he went to the Leibnitz-Volksschule from 1935 to 1939, and then until 1945 to the GutenbergOberrealschule. The war forced the Neeb family to leave Mainz and to settle temporarily in the village of Nierstein. However, Rolf Neeb was able to attend the Gymnasium (grammar school) in the nearby town of Oppenheim, and left with his Abitur (German school-leaving certificate) in 1948. In the same year he began to study chemistry at the reopened Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, where his teachers were W. Geilmann, F. Strassmann, T. Wieland, L. Horner, and G.V. Schulz. Neeb was a student with very wide interests, and even started to learn Arabic (personal information from T. Steudel). He finished his studies with a diploma, which was achieved under the guidance of the well-known analytical chemist Wilhelm Geilmann (May 16, 1891 to May 24, 1967) [1, 2]. Geilmann had been taught by Otto Wallach, Gustav Tammann, Richard Zsigmondy [3], and Carl Mannich [4, 5], and Mannich had supervised Geilmann’s PhD work in Hannover. Thus, one can trace Rolf Neeb’s scientific genealogy back in a straight line to the great Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner [6], who was largely self-taught (see Fig. 2). The German writer and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe frequently consulted Dobereiner on chemical issues, and he strongly supported his work at Jena [7]. Rolf Neeb’s diploma thesis (1954) concerned the separation of zinc from complex matrices. To achieve this he used a stream of hydrogen gas to reductively evaporate zinc metal—together with other reducible metals—and deposit them onto the cold parts of a quartz capillary. From there it was comparatively straightforward to dissolve the zinc in acid, and then determine the concentration using spectrophotometry or polarography [8, 9]. This was an early example of his scientific creativity, since we know that it was Neeb’s idea to develop such a method, not that of his supervisor (personal information from T. Steudel). Neeb stayed in Geilmann’s group and completed his PhD Anal Bioanal Chem (2009) 395:1571–1573 DOI 10.1007/s00216-009-2801-1